AbstractThis article is based on the proposal for evaluation submitted to the ESRC by the authors. The proposal offered an independent policy evaluation which would help people outside the Programme to know and judge what is going on, and those taking part in the programme to take into better account the impact on others of their activities and findings. The thrust of the proposal is formative, and focuses on the communication of research knowledge both within the programme, and between the programme and various interest groups and policy‐making bodies. The major concern of the evaluation is to understand and represent — through formative evaluation — the potential impact of the Programme on its intended audiences and users. This implies a focus on the research activities themselves (in so far as these emphases are separable). The relationship between the ESRC InTER Programme and the policy evaluation is an independent one. That is to say, the evaluation is sponsored by the ESRC, but is committed to independent internal and public reporting.The methods favoured by this evaluation are known by the term ‘naturalistic’, so‐called because they are like the ways in which people generally come to understand social life — looking, listening, and talking to people whose actions, experience and reasoning we have to represent and report in a useful form, and the article ends with a brief methodological justification for such an approach to poli